U.K. EXCLUSIVE

End Game

Today’s sporting contests are timed with a degree of precision that almost defies comprehension. The author surveys the development of our peculiarly modern obsession with outcomes—and the extraordinary timekeeping devices that have made it possible.

Michael Phelps won the seventh of his eight gold medals at the 2008 Beijing Olympics by a hundredth of a second—his narrowest win and the only race in which he did not break a world record. The amount of time that elapsed between his thwacking the touchpad at the end of his lane and the runner-up thwacking his was less than it takes for lighting to strike. Which is about three times faster than you can blink your eyes.

Such tiny durations are, on one level, as difficult to grasp and as removed from everyday human experience as the notion that the universe is held together by something called dark matter. But on another level their significance is perfectly clear to us all. The mind-boggling precision with which sporting contests are timed satisfies our hunger to know not only “Who won?” but also “By how much?” Pinpointing the margin of victory has come to seem intrinsic to competitive sport.

It was not always so. The ancient Greeks had a sophisticated interest in time and sport. They were good at measuring things and revered their athletes. Yet they did not bother to record the results of sporting events, beyond identifying the winner. For them, the “Who won?” part mattered greatly, but the “By how much?” part did not.

Thousands of years passed in this fashion. According to historian Nicholas James Mount, the practice of racing against a set time—winning a bet, for example, by riding a horse between London and York five times in a week—only began to give way to the practice of timing competitors over a set distance in the 18th century. The word “record”, he notes, was not used in its current sporting sense until the 1880s.

It was not only attitudes towards time that were changing: the tools with which time was measured were changing too. The earliest mechanical stopwatches were ordinary pocket watches that could be stopped at will by shutting down the entire movement. Proper stopwatches—ones that could not only tell the time but also had an independent dial whose hand could be started, stopped and reset, and could measure units of time of less than a second—began to appear in the early 19th century.

Sports timing as we know it today—automated, fastidiously “official”—grew up with the Olympic Games. When the first modern Olympics were held in 1896, the mechanical stopwatch had been more or less perfected within its natural limitations; before long it was accurate to a hundredth of a second. But the element of human error introduced by the starting and stopping of a stopwatch became increasingly irksome. What was the point of a stopwatch accurate to a hundredth of a second if the person operating it introduced slippage of a quarter of a second or more every time he pressed the button?

What’s on Ski-V tonight? The Omegascope showed athletes’ times as an event was broadcast. Courtesy of Omega.

For obvious reasons, brand-new timing devices have never been road-tested at the Olympics. “Sorry, don’t know what happened there—just getting the hang of this gizmo” are not words that any athlete would like to hear spoken by an official timekeeper. So the mechanical stopwatch was only gradually phased out. Although electronic timing devices had existed from the early years of the 20th century, the Olympics did not go “fully electronic” until 1964.

The use of radar guns in beach volleyball was a colourful hi-tech addition to an already colourful low-tech event at the Athens Olympics in 2004. But there have only been a handful of genuinely revolutionary developments in sports timing since the advent of the mechanical stopwatch. Perhaps the single most important of these innovations—in terms of both its accuracy and its usefulness across a wide variety of sports—is the photofinish camera.

“The only reason for time,” Albert Einstein quipped, “is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.” The only reason for photofinish cameras is to prove that everything didn’t. The first cameras of this kind were designed to distinguish the identifying numbers stencilled on the sides of freight trains as they sped by. Their potential in the sporting context was immediately clear. A portable photofinish camera was used to time the decathlon at Los Angeles in 1932, and they have been a fixture at Olympic events ever since.

Early photofinish cameras worked by reeling a strip of film past a narrow aperture or slit that was pointed at the finishing line. The film moved at approximately the same speed as the objects it photographed. The image created, therefore, was not a “snapshot” of a single moment in time but a composite of many images recorded over consecutive moments in time.

“The photofinish camera,” explains Christophe Berthaud, Omega’s doyen of Olympic timing, “effectively photographs time by combining time and shutter speed in one camera, in contrast to traditional cameras in which time and shutter speed run independently.” The rather poetic concept of “photographing time” is liable to provoke vigorous debate among philosophical types—possibly to the point of physical altercation if pursued without a sense of humour.

The photofinish camera has, of course, evolved beyond recognition from its boxcar-logging beginnings. The days of anxiously waiting for film to be developed after a close-run race are long gone—film itself has been eclipsed by digital technology. Omega’s latest Scan-O-Vision camera uses high-speed video imaging to record a staggering 2,000 pictures a second. Overkill? Apparently not. Berthaud points out that at the 2008 Beijing games there were two instances in which a result was determined on the basis of a single pixel’s worth of difference between competitors.

Comparably significant in the history of sports timing is the photoelectric cell, or “electric eye”. It made its Olympic debut at St Moritz in 1948 but is now used in both winter and summer games, as well as in many non-Olympic sports, from rodeo barrel racing—dressage for cowboys—to Formula One. Typically, a laser or infrared beam is projected from one end of the finish line to the other, where a light sensor receives the beam. As a competitor crosses the line, the beam is broken and the time clocked. From the outset photo cells were extremely accurate, to within a thousandth of a second—but they were also prone to mishap and vulnerable to changes in light or atmospheric conditions.

Though not, strictly speaking, a timekeeping device, the dashingly named Omegascope, which made its Olympic debut at Innsbruck in 1964, forever changed the way sport is experienced by viewers at home. Not only did it allow the times of several competitors to be displayed simultaneously: it also allowed their times to be superimposed over their moving images on TV screens. It was the televisual equivalent of an intracardiac adrenaline shot, or catnip for couch potatoes.

A scoreboard error meant Nadia Comaneci’s 1976 perfect ten was given as a one. From AFP/Getty Images.

Pressure-sensitive touchpads were first seen at Olympic swimming events in Mexico City in 1968. These registered concentrated pressure (from a swimmer’s hand) but not dispersed pressure (from waves in the pool) and sent a signal to a timing computer. Not only did this eliminate the need for dozens of officials arranged along each end of the pool with stopwatches in their hands and wet shoes on their feet: it was easily adapted to other timed sports, too, with the substitution of different sensors. False-start detectors, introduced for swimming and athletics events at Los Angeles in 1984, applied the same principles and have become similarly ubiquitous.

More recently, GPS devices and radio transponders—used to time cycling events and the marathon at Atlanta in 1996 and other events since—have come to the fore. Transponders emit a special code to receptors at the starting line, finish line and points in between, making it possible to chart the performance of an athlete, boat, car, sled or other moving object over the full course of a race.

Though the point of automated timing devices has always been to minimise human error, more and more humans have been required to manage their non-human replacements. In 1932 Omega sent one watchmaker and 24 stop-watches to the Los Angeles games—the first Olympics to have a single official timer. In 2008 no fewer than four jumbo jets freighted with 420 tonnes’ worth of Omega kit descended on Beijing, where an army of some 450 timekeepers, engineers and data handlers and 1,000 volunteer assistants was deployed to operate it.

Naturally, this grand-scale, long-term quest for glitch-free timing has not been entirely free of glitches. Bad weather is sometimes all it takes to blind an electric eye. A swimming touchpad may be foolproof but even the most exigently constructed pool is alarmingly wonky. As one sports-timing expert told The New York Times: “We take it for granted that the swimmers are all swimming the same length in the race, but they’re not. The very best construction specs will say, ‘This pool is 50 metres plus or minus one quarter of an inch’&hellip; Our ability to build things isn’t nearly as good as our ability to time them.” Consider the implications when Michael Phelps’s seventh gold medal in 2008 was won by two millimetres over a 100-metre race.

A 1956 Omega Swim Eight-O-Matic timer. Courtesy of Omega.

Spare a thought, too, for the less tangible things that these marvellous contraptions cannot measure. The coldly impersonal fractions of a fraction of a second that separate winners from runners-up encompass entire continents of human drama. A disputed microsecond may be the instant at which long years of hope and toil turn into even longer years of disappointment and regret. At Los Angeles in 1932 the same time was recorded for the winner and runner-up in five races. (Which is not as strange as it sounds: it still happens occasionally.) Officials compared their stopwatch readings, massaged the dis-crepant figures and made up a result. Somebody had to come first. In one of these dead-heat cases, the American Evelyne Hall was at last decreed to have lost the 80-metre hurdles final to her compatriot Mildred “Babe” Didrikson—not just a fine athlete but also an accomplished harmonica player who had several hit records in Texas. “She only won because she’s the crowd’s favourite,” the silver medallist sulked. Her tragedy is that she may well have been right.

On the whole, though, increasing precision in sports timing has been a force for good. It has changed the way we experience sport—and the way we compete. Alex Cheng, author of Splitting the Second, a memoir about his experiences marketing Omega’s sports-timing equipment in America in the 1970s and 80s, gives the example of real-time scoreboards. “Though not a critical part of capturing elapsed time, they greatly increased the drama and popularity of many sports,” he says. “In some sports they changed the performance tactics of the athletes. When the split times a few feet after the start of the bobsled were found to be closely correlated to finish times, the selection and training of riders for the powerful first thrust became more important than riding ability further along the route. Likewise, in swimming, seeing the split times of all competitors at every turn allows coaches and swimmers to adjust their strategy during the race.” Such things are also what keep us spectators on the edge of our seats, feeding our modern addiction to close calls, slow-motion replays and the harmless controversies to which they now and then give rise.

A handful of watch brands—Omega, TAG Heuer and Seiko—maintain R&D departments dedicated to sports timing. Their relentless efforts to contrive ever more accurate means by which to measure ever smaller segments of time verge on the frightening. They’ve cracked the 10,000th of a second; the 100,000th will no doubt follow. The thoroughly modern Jean Campiche, recently retired after two decades as head of TAG’s timing department, probably speaks for them all when he says: “Human judgement can be useful for specific situations, but it will never replace an electronic timing device. In most cases the human eye remains the third option, after the video finish and photo cells.”

So there you have it. Gold and silver to the machines, bronze to us. Man is no longer the measure of all things, but something that other things measure. What would the Greeks have had to say about that?